Photo by Yaroslav Blokhin
Website VinylHub catalogues record stores around the world, an increasingly useful tool for crate diggers as vinyl sales keep rising. Launched in 2014 by music database Discogs, Vinyl has identified over 6500 record shops, along with details like hours, storefront photos, and featured genres. Users can “follow” stores and mark which ones they have visited or hope to visit.
VinylHub is also a decent proxy for finding cool neighbourhoods (useful if you’re travelling or visiting a new city), since record stores thrive in walkable areas with an assortment of shops and a vibrant street culture. For instance, in New York, record shops are clustered around the East Village, Lower East Side, Greenpoint, and Bushwick.
Because the database includes closed stores, it can also be a sad reminder of the culture we lost when we moved to big-box chains, and then to online sales.
In a blog post, Discogs breaks down VinylHub data to show record stores by country, per capita, and in the world’s biggest cities (topped by Tokyo, with 93 shops). The site is still incomplete — surely there’s at least one record store in Algeria — so check if it’s missing your favourite shop.
VinylHub [via Dangerous Minds]
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